In my previous post, I talked about how the community service sector deals with many inefficiencies, such as lack of equipment or too many workers, lack of proper planning, fruitless workers, and a lack of specialized workers. In this one, I want to discuss what I believe can be done to minimize these problems and make community service have an even bigger impact.

There are various ways in which all of these inefficiencies can be minimized, most of which would probably need an increase in government involvement. Lacking equipment and having too many workers are usually a result of poor planning. When dealing with small, more local charities or groups, it might be hard to for them to properly gauge how much supplies or how many workers they really need. Most smaller groups are run by volunteers who may not have the proper training or experience to understand what is needed to get a job done fast.

When dealing with larger charities and groups on the other hand, it might just be that they haven’t been able to take enough time to survey damages before sending people in to do the job. Luckily, there is an easy solution to this: partner up. If smaller groups were to find larger groups of the same cause to act as a parent, they would be able to feed off of their knowledge on how to successfully run an organization, while the larger group would be able to use them as a resource when dealing with issues in that area. In time, better planning will be done on both parts.

Let’s face it; there isn’t much that can be done to about a fruitless worker. If someone doesn’t want to do worker, they aren’t going to do it. At most you can provide a person with training so that they might feel more comfortable with the work they are doing, or you could find other jobs for them to do where they might be more productive. In reality, that won’t help much.

Specialized work is perhaps the most important problem to fix. Not having a particular skill set can leave a volunteer out of a lot of important opportunities, but is something that can be easily fixed with proper training. One of the best ways to help would be for the government or an NGO to implement personalized training programs. However, if the government were to solely take on this task, they would have to bear the total cost of implementing these programs, such as hiring workers and getting supplies, which would most likely result in an increase of taxes.

On the other hand, if the NGO’s and government were to take on this task together, the cost could be better spread amongst those involved. First, NGO’s would need to set up a training program that would be run with other local businesses. If they were to partner up with local businesses, such as a local carpentry or flooring business, real professionals would be able to train potential volunteers, and in return, the government would give a tax break to the businesses involved, who’s workers would get paid for the days work. Work sites could also be used for training, that way work would be done on actual projects and no extra supplies will be needed. The NGO’s would then have free professional training; the volunteers would gain necessary skills in order to help others; the local businesses would get a tax cut; the government would be bearing less of the cost; and the worker of the local business would get a days pay. In this scenario, everyone wins.

Though there are these solutions to the problems, there is no real way to know how well they will work until such programs are implemented. The economics of community service is a highly under researched and without knowing the total effects of these inefficiencies, it’s almost impossible to be able to properly create solutions.